Tag: Confederacy

The Wicked City of Richmond in 1864

Edward A. Pollard, a die-hard supporter of the “lost cause” (indeed perhaps the inventor of the term), knew Jefferson Davis, and had an insider’s view of the dysfunctional Confederate government throughout the war. In 1869 he published a book with the provocative title Life of Jefferson Davis, with a SECRET HISTORY of the Southern Confederacy, Gathered “Behind the Scenes in Richmond.” The words “SECRET HISTORY” were printed in very large type on the title page, and the book was sold by canvassing agents, who doubtless relied upon the sensational impact of those words to make a sale. The book itself, however, is sober, well-reasoned, and well-informed. Mr. Pollard’s thesis is that the Confederacy, whose cause was (of course) just and noble, had all the resources at its command to conclude the war successfully, and the defeat was due to the vanity and incompetence of President Davis and the men who surrounded him. Here, as Grant moves in on Richmond, the wicked city continues its orgy of vice.

The government of Mr. Davis was not yet alarmed. It had no reason to be alarmed except for the chances of its own mistakes. Nobody in Richmond was alarmed—not even so much as when McClellan, in 1862, had displayed his standards on the banks of the Chickahominy. There was the same recklessness of vice in this city that it had displayed so early in the war, and that had pointed it out as the centre of all the crime and iniquity in the South. There were the same “faro banks,” on Main and other streets, with numbers painted in large gilt figures over the door, and illuminated at night; the same flashily dressed young men with villainous faces, who hung about the street corners during the day, and were gamblers, garroters and plugs at night: the same able-bodied, red-faced and brawny individuals who mixed bad liquors in the bar-rooms, and who held exemptions from military duty as consumptive invalids, or for some reason had been recommended by the Surgeon-General to keep in cheerful company and take gentle exercise; the same men who frequented the innumerable bar-rooms, paying five dollars for a drink of the bad liquors, and who, mistaken for men of fortune, happened to be out-door patients of hospitals, with a daily allowance for stimulants, or government clerks on salaries, the monthly amounts of which, would not pay for a single night’s carousal. The society of Richmond was given over to unabashed vice and revelry, to continue thus until the partial doom of Sodom should overtake it. The filthy and accursed city was indeed a commentary on the administration of Mr. Davis; for that he should have made of his capital such a place indicates his own unworthiness, and, no matter what local or particular excuses are made, men will think how weak and bad must have been the government, immediately around which the moral atmosphere was so impure. It has often been boasted of Richmond, that it never lost its confidence during the war; but we must confess that much of this confidence was a vile recklessness that lived in the twenty-four hours, not all the serious and manly faith which calculates the morrow, and reposes on its superiority to fortune. To the last vice kept open doors in Richmond. For the present it had taken out a new lease of its abodes, as it supposed itself secured by the immediate presence of Lee’s army, and confidently expected for Grant, the sequel of McClellan.

——From Life of Jefferson Davis, with a Secret History of the Southern Confederacy, Gathered “Behind the Scenes in Richmond,” by Edward A. Pollard.

We Are Not Losing the War

The Southern Literary Messenger, the brightest literary light of the South, continued publishing nearly to the end of the Civil War. Here in the February 1864 issue we find the editor ruminating on the pessimism of Confederate citizens and the many reasons to be cheerful about the prospects of the war. You may take it as a sign that your war is going badly for you if you find it necessary to enumerate all the reasons why you still might not lose. Perhaps it is also a bad sign that you have no one left who can tell you how to spell “panacea” or “mobilized,” or even “Southerner.”

Whatever may be the cause, the fact is sufficiently patent to be undeniable, that the popular mind, for months past, has laboured under a burden of sore depression. The assertion of a correspondent of an English paper, that the resolution of the South, so energetic in success, and indomitable in actual contest, staggers under the weight of misfortune and reverse, has in the lapse of the past six months received a substantial verification, which their unflinching fortitude and heroic constancy in previous stages of the war, equally attended by calamity and disappointment, had little prepared us to expect.

The leading causes of popular anxiety and apprehension, besides a countless variety of causes of minor weight, mutually co-operative, and perhaps all depending for their remedy upon the happy and successful solution of the more important problems, are the depreciation of the currency, the scarcity of supplies, and the absence of military success. As to the extent to which the first difficulty has been aggravated by the last, and the second by the concomitant action of both the others, it is needless to conjecture.

The great heart of the nation throbs with impatient solicitude as it awaits the application of the wished-for relief, and calculates the probabilities of its restoration to that elastic energy and buoyant hopefulness which, to the Southernor, is everything for contentment in quiet, and enthusiastic exertion in time of trial. With reference to the question of the currency, we will express no opinion, though the apprehension is well-founded, that if astute financial abilities in Congress be necessary, we have more to hope from future military success in the improvement of our finances, than from the fortunate consummation of any expedients of legislation. It is an exceedingly difficult matter for a politician to become so thoroughly imbued with the inspiration of patriotic devotion and self-sacrifice, as to forget entirely the consideration of his chances of re-election.

The question of supplies we believe to be greatly dependent upon the achievement of that military success, which after all, in time of war, is the great nepenthe, the panecea for national affliction, and which in the happy prosecution of the spring campaign will restore to us the country upon which we have been mainly dependent for supplies, and such additional territory as with a proper employment of the opportunity, will definitely put at rest the question of subsistence.

Many persons find it difficult to comprehend the possibility of such military results as are essential to our salvation, in the face of the disasters of last summer. That is as an exceedingly superficial and unintelligent view of the situation, which regards those events as having exercised any seriously adverse influence upon the fortunes of the Confederacy. The taking of a city, the gaining of a battle, the capture of an army, or even the subjection of a province, is but a small advance over the obstacles besetting the path which leads to the attainment of the object of an invasion which contemplates the conquest of half a continent. Napoleon won the battle of Borodino, in the attainment of those ends which are usually regarded as the elements of success in battle, viz: the discomfiture and. retreat of the enemy. He advanced to the heart of the most extensive empire of modern Europe, but in a few weeks retreated with an army almost annihilated and without another general engagement. Grant, who is for the nonce the military idol of Yankeedom, and who is to be the Agamemnon of the next crusade against us, has himself illustrated even in his brief career of martial glory, the impracticability of successful penetration of hostile territory in his memorable retreat from upper Mississippi, when Van Dorn captured his supplies at Holly Springs.

But what is there in the military situation which forbids the confident anticipation of the expulsion of the enemy, in the spring and summer, from the more vital sections of our territory? What have they now that they either did not have or could not have obtained twelve months since? The Mississippi river, and the country about Chattanooga. This answer comprehends the entire result of Yankee labour in the last twelve months. They claim to hold Tennessee. Yet only a few days since we are informed of the exploits of the indomitable Forrest in the very midst of the Federal garrisons, and with a force mainly recruited and organized within three months. Johnston is with the main army of Tennessee, imparting the inspiration and energy of his martial genius—and most bravely the work of re-organization and improvement progresses. Longstreet, with his invincible corps of trained veterans, from the unequalled cohorts of Northern Virginia, holds with an unrelaxed grasp the mountain passes of East Tennessee, ready, with the swoop of an eagle, to dash into Kentucky upon the unprotected flank of Grant, or to fall upon the more exposed situations of Federal power in Tennessee. Lee’s unconquered battalions, often victors than the Old Guard of Austerlitz, or the Tenth Legion of Caesar, are still intact, and present the old front of proud defiance to their ancient foe, whom to meet, with them, has been to conquer.

To offset all these cheering features of the situation, we are told of Yankee perseverance, of Yankee enthusiasm for the prosecution of the war, and of resolutions in the Yankee Congress pledging all their power and resources for its prosecution, and even of Yankee intention to raise a million of men to release their prisoners. As to the latter proposition, we wonder that while in their facetious mood, they did not think of a crusade of old women and bedlamites to march to the moon. The mob of crazy fanatics and conscience-stricken fools, who followed Peter the Hermit to the Holy Land, were nothing compared to such a spectacle as this army of Yankee Humanitarians. We can imagine the derision with which such a scheme will be received in Lee’s army after its experience with Pennsylvania militia last summer. Yankee perseverance we are already familiar with, having pitted Southern endurance and fortitude against it, and successfully withstood its most malignant exertions for nearly three years. To talk of Yankee enthusiasm in favour of the war, is absurd, when we remember the results of the last draft, that bounties, of $1,800 are now vainly offered in New York, and that the commutation feature of the conscription act has been repealed in consequence of the indisposition to enter the service of everybody who could purchase an exemption.

Panic or alarm are equally out of place in either people or legislators. We need not fear Yankee perseverance, or Yankee numbers. Better far than all these are a compact military organization, so disciplined and mobolized as to be thrown upon the enemy at any available point, prudent generalship, wise statesmanship, official integrity, and an inexorable devotion to our national independence.

——From the Southern Literary Messenger, February, 1864.